Walter de La Mare Quotes

We all take life for granted, one way or another.

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying: And this same flower that smiles to day, Tomorrow will be dying.

If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.

Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.

Because I can count on my fingers the number of sunsets I have left, and I don't want to miss any of them.

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.

Don't fear your mortality, because it is this very mortality that gives meaning and depth and poignancy to all the days that will be granted to you.

When you see how fragile and delicate life can be, all else fades into the background.

Life is fleeting. It is to be enjoyed.

I was taught to confront things you can't avoid. Death is one of those things. To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don't last for ever makes them beautiful.

Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour - let no night Seal thy sense in deathly slumber Till to delight Thou hast paid thy utmost blessing.

For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours.

Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.

Birth and death are the most singular events we experience - and the contemplation of death, as of birth, should be a thing of beauty, not ignobility.

Faces that have charmed us the most escape us the soonest.

It's so nice to get flowers while you can still smell the fragrance.

I hope maybe 'The Returned,' in some small way, can contribute to the argument of the poignancy of human life and make people not take for granted things.

The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.

Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.

Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye.